El Paso: A Novel (49 page)

MEANWHILE, TIMMY’S SPIRITS HAD IMPROVED IMMENSELY
since he’d recovered from the gila monster bite. Sometimes Tom Mix would put him on his horse, seated in front of him, and let the boy take the reins while Pluto, the Mexican hairless, trotted alongside. Once, after they’d set up camp, Mix took Timmy down the canyon and let him shoot his pistol at oranges he’d picked up and lined across a log. He even taught him rope tricks. Mix kept reminding them that Villa had only taken them along for their own safety and when they got to a civilized place he would send them back to their parents. They were not placated by this and Donita Ollas pooh-poohed it as lies and deception.

But even though Katherine wasn’t sure she believed Mix, she began more and more to like him. She especially liked the way he sometimes held her shoulders to help her down from her horse, and he was well skilled at conjuring delicious stews and soups at his campfire, while most everybody else was eating plain beans and beef. If they had to be captive, they could do worse than being under the care of Tom Mix.

During a break in chess games one evening, Villa asked Katherine to go for a walk with him. He was scrubbed clean and perfumed as usual and in the warmth of the canyons had removed his coat and hat as they strolled beside the streambed several hundred yards until they were out of earshot of the rest of the party.

“How old are you, little señorita?” Villa asked. He reached to tweak her cheek but she moved away.

“I will be thirteen soon,” she said.

“Do you still think I am a terrible person?”

Katherine didn’t know what to answer. If she said yes, it might anger him. If she said no, who knew what effect that might produce?

“I miss my mummy and papa,” she replied. She saw Tom Mix, sitting on a rock above the stream, industriously cleaning his pistol. Villa never seemed to notice his artful glances their way.

“I can understand that,” Villa said. He kicked a rock into the water and watched the ripples it made in the shallow stream. “Let’s hope that soon you’ll be with them.”

“How soon?” Katherine asked.

“It will have to be after we get out of these barrancas,” he said.

“And you’ll let us go then?”

“I will let you go when it is safe. You wouldn’t want me to turn you loose in Mexico with no protections, would you?”

“I don’t know,” Katherine said. “I think we could find our way home.”

“There are dangerous men out there,” the general replied. “There’s no telling what they might do.”

Katherine hung her head and looked into the water. She saw her reflection in the fading light. And then she saw Villa move close behind her, to one side, and reach out and put his arm around her shoulders. She smelled the perfume and below it the odor of perspiration he hadn’t been able to scrub off. His fingers clutched her upper arm.

“You could do me a favor . . .”

“No,” she said. “Please.”

“Señorita, I’m not going to hurt you. Believe me. I—”

“I want my mother!” Katherine cried, moving away. “I want my father!”

Just then a gunshot cracked out across the canyon walls and a bullet ricocheted off a large stone in the stream. Its nasty pinging note hung in the air as a high-pitched shriek. Villa grabbed Katherine by the collar and snatched her almost off her feet while diving behind some large boulders. He lay flat in the sandy gravel, holding her down beside him by her head. He cursed himself for leaving his pistol back in camp and remained motionless until he could only feel the beating of his heart. Soon there were voices, and a number of his men rushed up, including Tom Mix, brandishing his pistol.

From his hiding place in the shrubbery of the canyon rim, Julio clenched his teeth. He’d had Villa straight in his sights, but Johnny’s instruction had been to fire just to the side of him. It was not the time to kill the man. Julio remembered his own father, Buck, and wished he had put the bullet through Villa’s heart, but knew he had to do what Johnny said. After all, Johnny was the leader, and it was his wife they were trying to rescue. The plan Johnny had designed, and Julio was to implement, was fairly simple: to get Villa nervous; let him know that over a period of days, or weeks even, that people were trying to kill him. Then Villa might panic, send out troops away from the main body, out of the
querencia
, leaving Donita lightly guarded, which was when Johnny would make his move. From behind, Julio felt a sudden tap on his shoulder and knew it was Gourd Woman, the signal to hightail it.

“A sniper!” Villa shouted, pointing ahead high into the trees. The men began pouring fire, and when they quit, a hush refilled the canyon. “Sniper” was a new expression for “sharpshooter.” Market hunters who shot snipe were said to be the best shots. The British had coined the term on the Western Front in the big European war.

“Are you hurt, General?” somebody cried.

“No, I’m still here with the girl.”

Men appeared around the rocks and formed a sort of human shield around Villa and Katherine.

“Did you see a flash?” one asked.

“No, nothing. Only heard a single shot. It missed me by several feet.”

They continued the shield Villa and rushed him back to the campsite. It was dark by then and Villa’s men pulled up some wagons to form a barricade, while others hastily gathered a posse and galloped off in the direction they had heard the gunshot come from. Katherine was taken by Mix back to his own campfire. She was shaken but tried to be calm.

“You’ve skinned your knees,” Mix said. “Let’s put some salve on them.”

“I’m all right,” Katherine said.

“What happened?” asked Timmy.

“I don’t know, there was a shot. Just one. We hid behind rocks.”

“Who was it?” Timmy said. He leaned over conspiratorially. “Do you think it was Grandpapa and Daddy?”

“I don’t know,” Katherine repeated. Mix was rubbing the salve on her knees.

“Could have been anybody,” he said, but he said it without conviction. Somebody had fired that shot, but he couldn’t imagine who or why. The Federales would have ambushed them in force with machine guns. So would anybody else with a brain. A single shot, then nothing. Who knew what it meant?

Pancho Villa was thinking exactly the same thing, with one exception—Sanchez’s ghost. A lone rifle shot that had missed, but was that the plan?

A warning?

If Sanchez had wanted him dead, why not kill him? He was a big target. Also, he thought, the shooter might be one of the remnants of the Apaches. It was said a few might still be roaming the canyons after all these years. Whatever or whoever it was, Villa understood there was a price on his head in Mexico City, and it was a cheerless feeling, knowing that so many people wanted to kill him.

It was nearly half an hour before Julio and Gourd Woman made their way back to Johnny Olla’s place in the rear of the caravan. Rafael was already there and had related the confusion in Villa’s camp when the shot was fired. Rafael had sidled past various soldiers in the outfit until he got close enough to Villa’s tents to see what was going on. He didn’t know that because Villa had taken the walk with Katherine he wasn’t even there. Rafael hung around at the edges of the encampment, smoking and trying to look inconspicuous. When the shot rang out, almost everyone jumped to their feet, and there was a great commotion. In the faint light, Rafael could see Mix’s campfire, with Donita and Timmy and several others around it. Everyone stood up, and several men ran off toward the sound, but Tom Mix didn’t, as Johnny Ollas had hoped he would. When Julio and Gourd Woman reappeared, they, too, wanted to know what happened.

“They did not abandon her entirely,” Rafael said. “The Americano moved in close with her and the little boy and he looked pretty wary.”

“I could have killed him,” Julio said of Villa. “It was just luck and the last of the light that let me find him alone—or out with the little girl.”

“And they came after you?” Johnny asked.

“Oh, yes,” said Julio. “First a bunch of soldiers came running to where Villa had hid himself and the girl behind rocks. Then they started shooting, and that’s when we got out of there. But I could see they had got together a party to come after us on horseback. They rode up the canyon, probably close to where I’d been.”

“He could have killed him, all right,” Gourd Woman said. “He had plenty of time.”

“She’s got good eyes,” Julio said.

“I see what God wants me to see,” Gourd Woman replied.

“For a moment, I had his back right in my sights,” Julio said.

“Well, it’s not what we want quite yet,” said Johnny. “If we killed him, who knows what would happen? They might murder Donita on the spot. We need to be patient a little while longer.”

FORTY-SEVEN

F
or several days it was uncertain whether Bomba was going to live or die, but hot soups and warm compresses slowly restored his health. He remained weak but was finally able to sit up near the edge of the cave and look out over the ravine. The man had dressed him in warm clothing made of the skins of animals he had killed for food—deer, rabbit, squirrel. In time Bomba managed to walk around and explore the cliff dwelling. To his astonishment it contained dozens of rooms in vast catacombs deep inside the cliff. Bats hung from the roofs and swarmed out at twilight.

A spring burbled from the rocks, providing water. Pieces of pottery, broken and whole, were everywhere—as was a great scattering of bones, animal and human. One cavernous room was covered in layers of ossified human feces; in another were stacks of mummies wrapped in clay. Strange pictures were carved into the walls that told a story Bomba understood—of a people who lived in the wild and worshipped many gods. It was a creepy place, especially for a man of Bomba’s strong superstitions.

The man whose cave Bomba had stumbled on was named Henry O. Flipper, and in a land of strange stories, he had one of the strangest of all. He tried to convey it to Bomba over a period of several days, but wasn’t sure how much got through. Flipper, it turned out, had been the first Negro graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point.

He was born in Georgia, where his parents had been slaves before the Civil War. After he was commissioned a lieutenant, he was sent to Arizona to serve with the “Buffalo Soldiers” of the Tenth Cavalry regiment, chasing Indians. Five years later, while he was acting as commissary officer, several thousand dollars turned up missing, and Flipper was accused and court-martialed. The court acquitted him of embezzlement but found him guilty of “conduct unbecoming an officer,” and he was kicked out of the army.

Humiliated, for the next twenty-five years Flipper used his West Point training to make a living as a surveyor and mining engineer, mostly in Mexico, where he was trusted and respected by the mine owners and managers. Now in his fifties, Flipper had been on what he decided was his last mining expedition when the Mexican Revolution exploded.

Recently Villa’s people had swept through the gold, silver, copper, and tin mining towns in the sierras, driving out the gringos. A few weeks earlier they had murdered a dozen American mining engineers by shoving their train into a tunnel and then setting the tunnel on fire. Word of this quickly spread through the mining community, and scores of gringo miners scrambled best they could toward the border. Flipper himself had been trying to sneak toward Chihuahua City to catch a train north when he learned Villa was loose in the mountains. Since this was familiar terrain to him, he’d holed up in the cave of the mummies to await further developments.

When Bomba was able to convey what he was doing in this untamed wilderness, Flipper was amazed the man was still alive. Flipper felt lucky to be alive himself. He had stumbled on this particular cave by accident some weeks earlier, and considered himself especially fortunate to have come across it when it was almost winter.

“Pancho Villa and his ilk have even less liking of us than they do the white Americans,” Flipper stated bluntly. “When they shoot us, they shoot us twice—once to kill us, and once to kill our ghost.”

Bomba grunted. He had seen Villa’s penchant for violence.

Flipper was impressed with Bomba’s ability to read the pictographs on the cave walls. Over the years Flipper had become an expert on native languages and learned to decipher ancient symbols, but Bomba picked it up so quickly Flipper decided he must be a genius. Once, however, he stopped Bomba from entering a large and uncharted chamber of the labyrinth. Treasure or not, Flipper had never darkened that forbidding portal because of an inscription etched over the door. When Bomba started to cross the opening, Flipper restrained him, pointing up at the inscription.

“It’s a curse,” Flipper said.

Bomba studied the writing but could make nothing of it. There were no pictures, only language-like symbols.

Flipper translated:

“
As for the one who will violate this tomb, he shall be seized by Itzcoatl. He shall be for the flame of the Tepanec. He is an enemy and so is his son. May donkeys fuck him, may donkeys fuck his wife, may his wife fuck his son.
”

Bomba replied with a grunt.

“I don’t much believe in curses myself,” the old soldier said, “but this one seems sincere.”

“Whose is it?” Bomba asked.

“Who knows?” Flipper answered. “And it may be a bunch of shit, too, but why take the chance?”

When he recovered sufficient strength, Bomba asked Flipper if he could help him find Pancho Villa and the children. The two men were sitting on rocks by the fire on the ledge of the cave.

“You must be out of your mind,” Flipper responded. “Do you realize what he’ll do to you if he catches you—me, too, for that matter?” A misty rain was falling and Flipper had cooked up some beans and corn, along with a rabbit he’d caught in a snare and was roasting slowly on a spit over hot coals.

Bomba tried to explain about Katherine and Timmy and the family, but Flipper was having none of it.

“I understand loyalty,” he said. “Hell, I was the epitome of loyalty myself once—to an entire government—until that goverment turned on me and framed me and swept me back under the rug where they felt I belonged.”